El Huracan
There’s a strange sweetness that suffuses Charise Castro Smith’s story of four generations of Latina women in Miami — strange because the story it relates is soaked in sorrow and rent by violence of various kinds: the rage of hurricane Andrew, the ravages of dementia, the unraveling of a family, even death by drowning. Amalia Morris’ abuela likely has something to do with that sweetness, lost as she often is in happy past. (Or at least, she’s happy there, performing magic tricks with her husband in Cuba and dancing to Sinatra.) She exudes great, openhearted, almost aristocratic calm, even as the storm gathers and her daughter and granddaughter quarrel and her strangely damp sister beckons her to come swimming. The theme here is memory (and, alas, its loss), and both the writing and Daniel Jáquez’s direction do much to portray the way remembering makes time slippery — characters drifting in and out of consciousness, or shifting back and forth across the decades. At times, the effect is dreamlike, which may account for the muffling of the emotional beats mentioned earlier. When ghosts are as real to you as folks made of flesh and blood, death loses something of its dramatic force. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t old wrongs to bring up and hash out with both the living and the dead: when the family curse passes to the daughter, grandma's serenity gets replaced by bitterness. That replacement might be devastating, but it’s softened by a shift from the blunt vernacular into flights of lyricisim, talk of “rough magic” and how “our blood tries to destroy us.” Special mention should be made of the spare set design: the swirl of lights curling overhead might simply be the arm of the titular hurricane, but it feels like more: circular thoughts, perhaps, or a parade of souls.